There are few serious poets, activists, and biographers who haven’t taken inspiration from the indomitable Maya Angelou. A woman of immense passion and experience, the late Angelou (author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, six other autobiographies, and several books of poetry) could doubtlessly …

I really mostly just want to thank my wife… she was the one who had to put up with me. That she did so with love and patience and encouragement instead of strangling me, throwing my remains into a wood chipper, and then pretending she had never been married to me at all is a testament to the fact …

In part 1 of this article, I talked about what an ensemble cast involves and the times that writing one might be the best fit for your story. If that convinced you to embrace the ensemble (or if that’s what you wanted to do anyway), welcome to part 2, in which I’ll be talking about the mechanics of …

Writing an ensemble cast is harder than writing a single protagonist for the same reason that catching five cats is harder than catching one: you’re trying to do the same difficult thing multiple times, and the fact that you’ve already succeeded once doesn’t necessarily make the next step any easier …

Sometimes, the thing that makes a story pop isn’t the exact events of the plot or the details of the characterisation, but the context in which the story is presented. Sometimes, it’s setting up a question or expectation with an unusual title, like in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters and John …

Time: you can ignore it, but you can’t escape it.
With that sobering thought out of the way, let’s examine just what can be done about time in fiction. Just like in the real world, time and chronology will be present in your fiction whether you want them to be or not. You can choose to ignore …